


Acrophobia

by melissfiction



Category: Solar Opposites
Genre: Acrophobia, Fluff, M/M, Mark has a crush on Yumyulack but Yumyulack is too oblivious to notice, Misunderstandings, Romance, explaining human things to aliens, fears, ferris wheel date, hand-holding, markyulack, shlorpian lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 18:34:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30093348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melissfiction/pseuds/melissfiction
Summary: During the Halloween festival, Mark Melner takes Yumyulack on the ferris wheel to confess his crush. Yumyulack realizes he has crippling acrophobia.
Relationships: Yumyulack/Mark Melner
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Acrophobia

**Author's Note:**

> Starting ANOTHER NEW WORK????? 
> 
> Guilty as charged :( 
> 
> This has been rotting in my Google Drive folder for months and I'm just itching to post something new without actually writing something new. 
> 
> Enjoy!

The ferris wheel man eyed Mark Melner and Yumyulack’s height against the cardboard cutout of a yellow ruler. They were, indeed, at least 48 inches tall. 

“How many?” he asked. 

“Two,” Mark Melner answered, and the way he held up two fingers in case the ferris wheel man couldn’t hear him over the excited chatter in the autumn festival made Yumyulack feel—well, it made him feel a type of way that Yumyulack knew would only get worse once they were squished under the same metal bar in the same seat together. Thighs touching. No, probably not, actually. They weren’t Korvo and Terry. Mark Melner and Yumyulack were guys, less than friends, and guys that were less than friends couldn’t possibly tolerate touching. They would have to be on completely opposite ends of the seat with no less than six inches in between them. 

Yumyulack handed two bright blue ADMIT ONE tickets to the ferris wheel man. 

“Just holler if you need help,” the ferris wheel man told them. 

Yumyulack peered up at the rickety old ferris wheel that squealed horrifically with every degree it turned. He didn’t appreciate how thin the bars radiating out from its focal point into the main two circles dangling each seat were, or way it rattled as if it were exhaling its final breaths before death, or the orange rust that warranted a tetanus shot, or the fact that it had been built in under a day, and was that a loose screw he spotted? He could practically hear Korvo prattling off about every tedious detail of the shoddy craftsmanship, the same way he prattled off about the ship he was always “almost done” repairing. No, wait, that _was_ Korvo—just a few people behind him and Mark Melner. 

“Why would we need help?” Yumyulack asked.

The ferris wheel man shrugged. “Maybe you’re acrophobic. It happens.” 

He led the two boys to their bright candy apple red seat and fastened the metal bar to their laps with a noise that sounded like a chattering teeth toy being winded up, then a button was pushed and they were moved along the circular path for the next party of three or less to be introduced to their seat. Neither Yumyulack nor Mark Melner had time to claim their territory at the opposite sides of the seat, but moving after the fact would be too obvious and awkward, so they stayed squished together in the middle. Yumyulack decided that the spacing must not be the important factor. It must be how well you could cope with what you were given. Yumyulack was good at that. He didn’t think anything could be worse than having your homeworld explode into a trillion bits, dispersing into the stars and returning its energy back to the universe while you embark on an impossible mission with three total strangers and a bio-weapon to find a new planet to terraform. 

“Why would you wanna get off a ferris wheel if you’re afraid of spiders?” Yumyulack asked. “Are there a lot of spiders on ferris wheels? Not that I’m afraid of spiders, but they’re still gross.”

Mark Melner laughed. “That’s arachnophobia, dude. Acrophobia is the fear of heights.” 

“Oh.” Yumyulack was too occupied with the fact that Mark Melner had just called him _dude_ than the true definition of acrophobia. He was totally in with the cool guys’ lunch table, now. “Well, I’ve been in space before, so I think I can rule out acrophobia.” 

They ascended a few more feet in the air. That was no problem for Yumyulack, because he was definitely not paying attention to how strained every movement of the wheel was nor was he thinking of how freely his feet dangled below. They were only about ten feet in the air, by now. Yumyulack had fallen from higher heights than that. 

“The line was so short ‘cause they’re about to light the fireworks,” Mark Melner explained. 

“I thought fireworks were for the Fourth of July and New Year’s,” Yumyulack said. 

“Well, sometimes they’re just there for celebrations. It really ties together a special occasion, plus they’re gonna be orange.” 

“Orange?” 

“Y’know, ‘cause of pumpkins. ‘Cause we’re at a pumpkin patch.” 

“Oh.” Yumyulack followed the general logic. Unlike Korvo, he had the social pressure of judgmental teenagers at school to train him not to ask too many unnecessary questions. Earthlings got uncomfortable being questioned too much because they were uncomfortable with the realization of just how mindlessly they adhered to society’s standards. Yumyulack had to follow the same pattern of mindless adherence to societal standards while simultaneously learning what those standards were. Sometimes on Earth, things happen a certain way and it doesn’t make sense and you let it happen. It wasn’t too foreign of a concept. After all, conformity is cool. “That’s cool.” 

They ascended slightly higher, then stopped with a sudden jolt that sent their seat rocking back and forth wildly. 

“Holy shit,” Yumyulack whispered to himself. He had a death grip on the cold, metal safety bar and prayed for the seat to be still again. He wasn’t scared. Just surprised. 

Mark Melner had a sudden shiver overtake his figure. “It’s fuckin’ cold up here, man.” He missed the warmth of the generator powering the wheel below. 

“You can take my sweater,” Yumyulack offered. 

“Really?” 

Yumyulack slipped off his blue turtleneck and handed it over to Mark Melner. It was a tight squeeze, especially over his hoodie, but Mark was grateful for how tightly it hugged around his chest. He brought the neck of the sweater to his nose and took in a deep inhale of the warm, floral scent. 

“Uh. You good, Melner?” Yumyulack asked. Cool guys called each other by their last names. Too bad Yumyulack didn’t have one. Maybe he could make one up, one day. 

“O-Oh! Uh! Sorry—it just smells really good.” Mark felt his face warming up. “W-What kind of detergent do you use?” That was the worst excuse he had ever come up with, but he was hoping that an alien wouldn’t simply brush it off as more human nonsense. 

“I think Tide? But we use the unscented kind ‘cause the Pupa has allergies.” 

They ascended higher, but without a jolty stop. If Yumyulack was afraid, and he wasn’t, it would only be out of low confidence for the idiot that designed the ramshackle of a ferris wheel he was on. He remembered how frustratingly loose the screw on the main beam of the ferris wheel was. He had to distract himself. 

“You said you had something to tell me?” Yumyulack tried to keep his attention on what was in the seat: their touching thighs, their shared warmth at their hips, their elbows resting against each other’s on the safety bar. Yumyulack and Mark had separated from their sisters to escape into the line for the ferris wheel. Together, now, they indulged in relief, far from sibling rivalry in winning cheap plushies at rigged games. 

“Oh. Right.” 

Mark kicked his feet back and forth nervously, which gently swung the seat back and forth. Yumyulack withheld a scream. 

“Well, it’s not really something I want to tell you. It’s something I want to ask you,” Mark confessed. “When I’m around you, I start to get this feeling that I’m remembering something. It’s like I’m remembering something from a dream. I’ve felt this way ever since that party at Barn’s.” What he didn’t mention was that it was Yumyulack’s _smell_ that gave him déjà vu. Yumyulack smelled good. Comfortingly familiar. That was too embarrassing to say out loud, but then again, everything he was saying was embarrassing to say out loud. He covered his face with his hands. “What am I even saying? I’m so stupid!” Yet, the embarrassment somehow brought him closer to the memory buried deep in his mind. “I guess what I wanted to ask you is—” 

Mark was cut off when the wheel started spinning slowly but surely, until it reached a steady pace. Yumyulack’s grip on the safety bar tightened. His heart raced. Every shallow inhale was followed closely by a brief exhale. The wheel was so much taller at the top than it had seemed at the bottom. In space, there was no ground below to crash into when you fell. The people on the ground looked as small as The Wall denizens, shrunk and teeming around like ants.

Everything was dizzying: the smell of kettle corn and fried oreos, the warm lights below, the touching of their thighs, the blaring of Monster Mash through the festival’s intercom speakers, but especially the distinct sequence of images flashing through his mind. Intrusively, he imagined the safety bar disappearing, the friction coefficient between his butt and the seat reducing to 0 and slipping him off like a sunny side up egg on a non-stick frying pan, the few seconds of weightlessness before he plunged straight down to the ground, and shattering into a trillion bits just as Shlorp had when the meteor hit. The last image replayed over and over again. In his mind’s eye, his skin was glass and his flesh was porcelain and blue blood splashed all around his broken bits. He could see every single frame of the destruction, the infinitesimal shards twinkling like glitters of stars against his ocean of blood, the spinning of the bigger pieces like a ballerina’s pirouette, and the force of the impact sending all his bits flying out in an explosion of sharp, tinkling noise. 

Yumyulack didn’t know how _fast_ the ferris wheel would spin. He met the peril of the top as soon as he met the safety back at bottom, then again and again in an awful cycle where he only had time to learn that the fear seeped deeper into his core than the comfort at the bottom. He was certain the wheel didn’t meet OSHA standards, as certain as he was that he _was_ acrophobic despite knowing heights higher than the Earth’s deteriorated ozone layer. 

“Hey, are you okay?” Mark asked. He was genuinely concerned, but also grateful that Yumyulack’s apparent uneasiness had taken his mind off of what Mark was trying to ask earlier. He smirked. “You’re acrophobic, aren’t you?” He nudged Yumyulack teasingly. 

“ _No I’m not!_ ”

“Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure. So you won’t mind if I do _this…_ ” Mark started swinging the seat back and forth wildly. Yumyulack punched him hard in the shoulder, hard enough for Mark to realize that Yumyulack’s instinct was more fight than flight. “Ow! Okay, sorry!” Mark stopped his torture. He glanced down at his Apple watch. The fireworks would be starting very soon. “Hey, c’mon, heights aren’t so bad. We’re more likely to die from having our planet destroyed by alien invaders than from the ferris wheel suddenly collapsing.” 

Yumyulack remembered the mission, the Pupa, the realization that whatever connections he made on Earth wouldn’t last long anyway and he was only biding his time along until either Korvo fixed the ship or the Pupa evolved into its final form and terraformed the planet in the image of the homeworld. Mark’s comparison wasn’t saying much. “Y-Yeah, I guess you’re right.” His fingertips started to go tingly and cold and numb. 

“If you want, you can hold my hand,” Mark offered. “I’m scared of needles, so I always hold my mom’s hand when I get vaccinations.”

Yumyulack didn’t hesitate to grab Mark’s hand. He had a death grip that cut off Mark’s circulation, but Mark wouldn’t complain. Mark interlaced their fingers. 

“Um… So… What I wanted to ask earlier was if something happened between you and me at Cooper Barn’s party, ‘cause I was so high or drunk or something that I don’t remember shit.” 

“What!” Yumyulack let go of Mark’s hand. “Nothing happened! W-W-What are you even talking about? I didn’t even go. I, uh, wasn’t even invited. So the chances of anything happening involving me at that party is zero percent! Because I wasn’t even there! So, nothing happened. Nothing at all!” 

“Oh.” Mark slumped down, defeated. He was sure, from the way his heart fluttered around Yumyulack, that something happened at that party. Maybe it was all just a faraway dream that implanted such a dumb idea in his subconscious, like the science fiction action film Inception, starring Leonardo di Caprio. His stupid schoolboy crush was just some Inception-type nonsense, that’s all. “Yeah, right. Sorry about that. I mean, about not inviting you to the party...” 

“No, it’s fine. I hate crowds, anyway.” After Cooper Barn’s party, Yumyulack never wanted to go to another high school party again. He also diligently washed his hands at every chance he got. “I think hanging out like this is better. Y’know, just one-on-one.” 

“Yeah!” Mark hated himself for sounding too excited. That was totally uncool of him. He cleared his throat and started over, forcing a more monotone response. “I-I mean, uh, _yeah_. This is cool. Just you. And me. Alone. Together.” 

The wheel creaked to a halt, pausing Mark and Yumyulack at the very top. The Monster Mash ended, granting them silence, other than the tinnitus ringing in Yumyulack’s auditory sensors. Mark’s heart was racing, but not because of how high off the ground they were. Now was the perfect moment to ask Yumyulack what he _really_ wanted to know, and if this opportunity passed him by, he may never get his answer. 

“Actually, there’s another thing I wanna ask, if you don’t mind,” Mark said. 

“About the party?” 

“No, something else.” 

“Okay, cool, because I was nowhere near Cooper Barn’s party and I totally have no idea what crazy shenanigans you could have gotten into at that party that you mysteriously cannot remember for some weird reason unrelated to me!” 

Mark looked Yumyulack in the eyes. Yumuyulack was caught off-guard by that. Cool guys weren’t supposed to make eye contact. It was too sincere. Too intimate. Cool guys were ironic and communicated in fond insults and never took anything seriously. They made a ruckus in homeroom and excluded the uncool guys from their parties and flirted with pretty cheerleaders. Yumyulack was not a pretty cheerleader. 

The air was hot between them. The autumn chill that they could see in the white puffs of condensation when Mark finally asked his question had no effect on them. Yumyulack felt his dizziness worsen. 

“If something _did_ happen between us… would you mind?” 

A stream of smoke let out a shrill screamed, then popped into the sky in an orange chrysanthemum burst. Most of the fireworks were orange, like the pumpkins in the pumpkin patch as Mark had mentioned, but some were bright red and bright yellow and popped into sparkling glimmers and flowing streams radiating from a single focal point. Some popped out into clusters of circles, like the protruding spike proteins on a virus, and some occurred in smaller trails of glitter streaming out like spider legs. There were purple comets and white bursts that spiralled crazily in the sky like serpents before disappearing and waterfalls of orange on either side of a firework that exploded into dots forming a distinct pumpkin shape. Other fireworks burst into shapes of bats and ghosts and witch hats. The smell of smoke and sulfur intermingled with the festival’s fried food aromas. 

The light of the fireworks was blinding and left spots in Yumyulack’s vision. Each boom reverberated deeply into his chest. He stared at a crackle of blinking lights that were like fireflies and remembered how deafening and blinding the destruction of Shlorp was. How high up in outer space he was. And most of all, how strongly he felt doomed, not unlike how strongly Mark felt his sense of déjà vu when he smelled Yumyulack. Mark was still awaiting the answer to his question, but Yumyulack’s psychological torments brought him far past the worry of mere high school romantic pursuits. 

“Get me down from here!” Yumyulack shrieked. “I want off! _Please_ get me off!” 

Mark grabbed Yumyulack’s hand. “Woah, calm down! It’s okay!”

Yumyulack slapped Mark’s hand away. “Fuck you! I don’t want to be anywhere near you right now! I just want off! Get me the hell away from you!” 

Mark’s heart broke into a trillion pieces. Below, the ferris wheel attendant watched the fireworks display obliviously while recording the beautiful scene with his phone camera. Thirty degrees counter-clockwise from Mark and Yumyulack, Terry was pointing out all of his favorite fireworks to Korvo. 

Yumyulack began mindlessly screaming until the attendant’s attention was finally caught. In a hurry, the attendant went to set down his phone on the control deck, but it accidentally slipped out of his fingers and fell on the lever controlling the ferris wheel’s speed. The ferris wheel went from Not Moving to Moving Really, Super-Duper, Insanely Fast. Terry threw his hands in the air and cheered. Yumyulack screamed even louder. 

“W-Wait…” Korvo put his hand on Terry’s shoulder. “Do you hear that?” 

“Hear what!” Terry yelled back, at an unnecessarily loud volume. He stopped and listened for a few seconds to the high-pitched shrieking above them. “Oh, shit! That’s Yumyulack!” 

Korvo lifted the safety bar up and took out the slowdown ray gun from his pocket. He shot Terry and himself with the ray gun, then they both proceeded to jump down from their seat in slow motion. They descended gently and yelled in a deep, distorted voice to stooooop theeeeee wheeeeeeeeeeel. 

“I can’t!” the attendant said. “The lever is stuck!” 

Korvo shot Terry and himself with the speed-up ray to undo the effects of the slowdown ray. “You stupid humans and your terrible engineering skills. W-Why should a ferris wheel even _have_ that kind of setting?” 

With his great Shlorpian engineering knowledge, Korvo walked over to the generator and turned the dial from on to off. The wheel slowed to a gentle stop, thus stranding Mark and Yumyulack at the very top of the wheel. Terry moved Korvo a few steps to the left, saving him from the splatter of Yumyulack’s vomit. 

Terry took out his phone. “I’m calling the fire department.” 

Korvo took out his phone, too. “I’m calling _OSHA!_ ” 

* * *

On the drive home, Yumyulack wore Jesse’s red riding hood cloak over his shoulders as a blanket. Yumyulack insisted on having the windows down, despite the cold air outside, because the smell of kettle corn stuck to their clothes made him nauseated. Terry softly sang along to Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the radio to lighten the mood, but nothing could quell Yumyulack’s utter humiliation. 

“I made a total fool of myself in front of Mark Melner, dammit!” Yumyulack lamented. 

“That’s not true,” Korvo argued. “You made a total fool of yourself in front of _everyone._ ” 

Jesse tried her best to withhold her snickering. 

“Gee, thanks, Korvo.” Yumyulack hugged the warm Pupa’s body to himself for comfort. If only the fear was the worst part. They were having a nice moment, a wonderful _date_ with sweater-borrowing and hand-holding and love-confessing—that part, Yumyulack would treasure for the rest of his short, lonely, bleak life, but then he had to go and ruin everything just because he was a few feet off the ground. He was going to put the high school bullies out of business with how much he was beating himself over it. “I don’t know what happened. I just got so freaked out being so high up! I’ve never been so scared of anything before.”

“It’s not your fault,” Terry assured. “It sounds like you just found your worst fear. A Shlorpian’s worst fear comes from their progenitor’s deepest regret. When I was your age, I found out I had this crazy irrational fear of swimming. I did some digging and found out my gene donor daddy lost a big swimming race.” 

“Did you ever get over your fear?” Yumyulack asked. 

“I did,” Terry said, and that gave Yumyulack a twinge of hope, “but to get over your worst fear, you have to reconcile with your progenitor’s regret. I got over my fear of swimming when I realized that failure is inevitable and you should just never try hard in the first place.” 

Yumyulack didn’t think that was the best takeaway from such a regret, but if it worked, it worked. He didn’t want to be scared of heights for the rest of his life. Never again did he want to feel utterly powerless like he did on the ferris wheel, knowing his response is irrational yet not being able to control it. That was something else he inherited from Korvo: the need to be in control. 

“Korvo, hurry up and tell me your deepest regret so I can stop being afraid of heights!” Yumyulack demanded. 

“I... I don’t know my deepest regret,” Korvo admitted. He knew he regretted not being able to save more people before Shlorp got hit by the meteor and not being able to complete the ship repairs, but if it’s a regret that was passed down to Yumyulack in the form of a fear of heights, it had to be something from before Yumyulack was conceived. He was drawing a blank. He wasn’t particularly penitential. Sometimes he regretted getting an A minus on a test instead of a solid A plus, but that had nothing to do with heights. “It must be so deep that I’ve repressed it.” 

Yumyulack let out a loud wail of anguish. Ferris wheels, roller coasters, hiking up steep mountains—experiences all doomed to his crippling acrophobia. 

“Don’t worry, Yumyulack,” Terry declared. “Just leave it to me!” 


End file.
